I recently watched a home that I built burn down. It was an experience that is kind of hard to describe.I found myself rembering the construction, what we were doing on each day even down to where the crew members were working on that day. When I talked to the guys that worked on the house we all seemed to have a strange feeling that something had been taken away from us , but couldn’t explain what .
It happened to a family of four there were no injuries and everone was safe. I talked to the owners a week after the fire and they said almost everyone that work on the house came buy and walked through what was left and were very quiet and solemn.It was almost like they had lost something also.
The fire started in a wood burner/fireplace at night and the wife woke her husband and said she smelled smoke . He went to the inside walls and felt heat comming from the drywall and called the firedept. Of course it was in the middle of a 6 inch snow storm with winds blowing 30 plus in a rural location with mud a foot thick. The fire rekindled several times but fortunatly the fire trucks were stuck in the mud and were able to put it out repeatedly My hats off to Vol. fire depts eveywhere.
This was a panelized home and on my recommendation we used webbed floor truss’s for free span and engineered chases for plumbing HAVC and other use. In looking at the collapsed floor truss’s they must have acted like a chimney and allowed the fire to spread through the second level rapidly because of the open space. I saw the bottom of the sub floor sheeting with a 3 ft hole burned through but the carpet that was on top of it did not burn the truss must have acted like a wind tunnel.feeding the fire .
I hope this might be general info and if Boss Hog is around maybe he can give insight to the nagging floor truss question , I believe the house was panelized from Truss/Slater in Virden.
If anyone has similar experience I would like to hear from you.
Thanks in advance ….Nails
Replies
Hey nails - nice to hear from you again.
I hadn't heard about the fire, so I don't know where it was or who did the panels. Glad to hear no one was hurt. Must have been the day before Thanksgiving?
The question of floor trusses and fires is complicated. They certainly do allow for more airflow during a fire. Whether they pose a significant hazard during a fire will be debated long after you and I are gone.
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I did a thread about Trusses and Fires quite a while back, if you're interested:
http://forums.taunton.com/n/mb/message.asp?webtag=tp-breaktime&msg=33149.1
Also did one on I-joists burning:
http://forums.taunton.com/tp-breaktime/messages?msg=37987.1
A. Sexual harassment.
Q. What is it when a woman talks dirty to a man?
A. $3.99 a minute.
Wow. A house that we built burned up (over half the house destroyed) last week. At least nobody was hurt.
I know how you feel, Kinda like something was taken from you. I looked at stuff that I had installed, all black and charred. It was very sobering.
I heard that the fire was started by a space heater in the garage where they were going out to smoke their cigaretes. If this is the case I have no sympathy for them. If not, I apologise. This sure isn't a very good time of year to be suddenly homeless, Although it seems to be when most of these fires occur.
I have sympathy for anyone who loses their house by accident whether through oversight or downright stupidity, it's tragic to me all the same. I'm not so smart that I can't imagine myself doing something stupid and losing everything. Maybe it would be my fault, but I think that just makes it harder (and I'm not saying that person was at fault). I share a house, by the way, and one of the roomates left a space heater on for three days. I just discovered it. That could have been me and through no fault of my own!Tom
I read somewhere, where 72% of all house fire are occupants fault, with the rest being design and mother nature fault.